


something more alive than silence

by d_claiborne



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, F/M, M/M, POV Second Person, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-08
Updated: 2019-06-08
Packaged: 2020-03-20 00:00:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18981043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/d_claiborne/pseuds/d_claiborne
Summary: we are not together herethough we lie entwinedSteve returns to Peggy. Steve wants to believe he lives a happy life. Steve can't stop remembering. Steve carries a hole in his chest.





	something more alive than silence

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first foray into writing in this fandom, although I've been on its sidelines for many a year. Please forgive any mistakes. Excuse any canon divergence - it was most likely on purpose to suit the fic. 
> 
> Title & part of summary taken from Vienna Teng's _Between_.

You refuse to remember for the longest time.

You dance with her. You let her fill you up with love. You let her remind you that life is oblivious to your particular circumstances.

You make love to her often.

Every morning, you wake up and you feel the exact same surge of energy as when Doctor Erskine looked at you and put the stamp in your file. You get out of bed, put on a shirt, ignore how alien it feels after all the tight new-millenium shirts, pick up the newspaper from your perfect lawn, read it, make coffee, Peggy smiles, you laugh, you both leave, work, lunch break, nine-to-five, dinner, sleep.

Sometimes, you wake up in the middle of the night and cold sweat glistens on your forehead like starlight.

But you refuse to remember for the longest time.

Then it snows for the first time _since,_ and the snow is as white as his hair used to be dark. You refused to remember with so much vigor, but now a hand that feels as fatal as Thanos’ squeezes around your chest.

You were both children, weren’t you?

That year that snow covered Brooklyn in velvet-white powder that looked more expensive than your sheets. Not even eighteen years old.

You remember now: two boys with fingers sweating in gloves, pinkies entwined. You walked what felt like the length of Brooklyn. It felt monumental. The fresh snow creaked under your feet, creaked and crunched and whined, and soon your toes were wet and it didn’t matter, and you were cold and it didn’t matter.

You walked to Central Park and rented skates, and skated and skated and skated. It was so cold, you remember. It started snowing again and the snowflakes caught in his hair. They made him look so alive.

You wanted him to kiss you, but you loved him all the more when he didn’t.

He bought you a hot chocolate.

You wanted to kiss him, and you regretted it all the more when you didn’t.

Now it snows again and you know that almost a century has passed since that moment of not-kissing, but it’s only been a few years at the same time, and what is time anyway?

Does any of this matter? Do you?

You don’t want to remember him and the way he looked in the snow. You want to hold her hand. You want to walk out of the door with her, you want to make her laugh, you want to build her a snowman.

You don’t want to spend your life wondering if the boy who regretted not kissing his best friend in the middle of 1940s’ Central Park ever grew up to be a man regretting the same thing.

It snows; then the snow melts.

You refuse to remember.

 

 

**xxx**

 

 

You don’t want to remember.

At the end of it, though, it’s like your brain has been secretly keeping count and not telling you. It only tells you now, on the day of. It leaves you bare-handed, no gun, no shield. How do you fight this? What will be your weapon of choice? What will be your weapon of war? How do you snap your fingers against this, and how do you rewrite the story?

You don’t want to remember how many years it has been.

You remember remembering, though.

After you woke up, that was one of the first things you remembered. You searched for Peggy, and then you remembered the way he fell, and how you were happy you were falling too, because that meant you both took a dive and maybe you would find each other at the bottom of it. Have you resurfaced? You’ve asked yourself this question many times.

It’s been decades and it’s only been a couple of years. Yes. You know. This will always confuse you. You have learned to see time as a thread. It’s hard to tell who’s in charge of the needle.

You wanted to believe that it’s you.

You’re not so sure.

You turn away from her that night.

Her brown curls smell like youth, which you’ve forgotten. She doesn’t smell like that which you do remember.

You would hate to use her. You know you could turn to her. You could wake her up, she would look at you with her quizzical and stern look before letting her features relax, and you could kiss her on the mouth cheeks chin nose neck collarbone belly button inner thighs loins.

You can’t. It’s not fair to her. Not on these nights. Not on anniversaries you shouldn’t be remembering.

In the distance - not a state away, or a country, or a continent, but decades in the distance, time is a way to measure space now - he’s okay and he’s alive. Don’t remember.

It’s not like you want to.

 

 

**xxx**

 

 

 _Here’s the thing_ , you say to yourself. _You could go to Russia and create a parallel timeline where everything would be different._

 _What’s stopping you?_ you ask yourself.

It’s true. You could go to Russia. You could create a timeline. You could create a timeline where he is a free man. You could create a timeline where he has memories. A timeline where he remembers your name.

 _His own name_ , you remind yourself. A timeline where he remembers his own name.

Why should this be a new timeline? Why is this not how things turned out here? You are a coward these days. You don’t ask yourself the hard questions.

 _So here’s the thing,_ you tell yourself again, _Why don’t I go to Russia?_

He would remember you. He would call you _buddy_ in Russian. How do you say _buddy_ in Russian? Your first impulse is to open a laptop and Google it, but you’re still years and years away from being able to do that.

Do you have a Russian dictionary?

This is the year that she finds you learning Russian words every other night, because these nights you can’t sleep.

You’ve been with her for so long. For years. Your relationship has blossomed. You are best friends, lovers, companions. You are each other’s answer.  You don’t know why you’re suddenly so bothered by this.

 _He’s probably not in Russia anymore_ , you tell yourself.

One morning, the paper on your perfect lawn says _HOWARD AND MARIA STARK DIE IN CAR ACCIDENT ON LONG ISLAND_.

He’s not in Russia anymore.

You’ve let it pass time and again.

“What are you doing?” she asks you when she sees you throwing out all the dictionaries.

“I think I’d rather learn Spanish,” you tell her.

You never learn anything beyond _mierda_ in Spanish, though - and you’ve known that since middle school when the kids around your neighborhood taught you how to pronounce it, and you then taught him.

 

 

**xxx**

 

 

You start to feel your age around the same time as you start wishing to stop feeling the serum.

You’ve been old a long time, though, you think. Centuries.

You refuse to remember, you don’t want to remember; your heart doesn’t care for what you refuse or want anymore. The other day, you had to take a piss twelve times, it’s not like you have any dignity or integrity in front of yourself, you might as well remember.

You also cried the other night. She held you.

“What’s wrong?” she kept asking you.

“Nothing, nothing,” you kept repeating, “Nothing.”

She thought you meant nothing was wrong. You, of course, meant that you feel nothing, and it is very scary, and you do not know what to do with it, and you’ve lost your pep-talk abilities, and you love her, but at the same time you love him, and you don’t love either, or yourself, and it’s all terribly confusing and tiring.

You suddenly remember that you didn’t kiss him on the skating rink, but you watched him kiss other girls years later and you jerked off to this imagery on the daily.

You suddenly remember that you wanted to fall like he did because you wanted to be closer to him.

You suddenly remember that the first time you saw him again and saw his shoulder length hair, you jerked off to it again and again, after you healed. It was angry and ugly and you are still ashamed of yourself, but you did it.

You suddenly remember that after you reunited, he became more than he had ever been, and he was a killing machine out of order, but you would have become a killing machine for him willingly.

You suddenly remember that you promised yourself you wouldn’t think his name because it sounded like begging to you. You suddenly remember and you feel guilty because you’ve been breaking this promise for years.

Bucky, you think when you wake up; Bucky, you think when you pick the paper off the goddamned stupid lawn; Bucky, you think when the winter cold chills you on your way to work; Bucky, you think when you return home; Bucky, you think as you fall asleep; Bucky, your mind screams when your nightmares wake you from restless sleep.

Peggy, you also think your every waking hour.

You’ve made so many mistakes in your life. Is loving two people one of them? What was the right choice? What is better left uncovered?

Most days you think the best thing left uncovered is an aircraft under heaps of snow.

 

 

**xxx**

 

 

You have been a coward all along, haven’t you? It’s only at the end of it all when you finally tell her.

You say:

“Peggy, I have something to tell you.”

You say:

“Peggy, I love…” and then you get stuck like a scratched up vinyl. “I love Bucky.”

She says:

“Steve, I’m not stupid. I know.”

She remembers the 107th. She remembers the ugly mud-color of war. She remembers that color on both your faces. She remembers losing you the same way you’ve lost her and him and yourself. She remembers the way you looked at her. At him.

 _Steve, she’s not stupid_ , you reprimand yourself. Of course she remembers as much as you do.

She says:

“I loved this one girl.”

Does this mean you love each other the most, though? The fact that you ended up choosing each other? Does this mean you understand love more, your decisions were clearer and better, more mature than the decisions of others?

You’ve been keeping this from each other but you don’t see it as a secret. She accepted you because there was a tie as long as the depths of the Pacific Ocean between the two of you. You went back to her because you thought you owed it to Tony, which was your disguise for wanting something normal and primal and long-ago because the future was and is messy, and you secretly; naively thought you owe something to yourself. That’s not how things work; supersoldier..

Iron Man is on the news. New York is under attack. The Stark Tower. The sky opens up.

He’s somewhere out there. You’ll see him soon, you know. All these bad things are happening and this timeline is a fixed spot that you cannot and will not and want to change. But it’s too late, you tell yourself.

You’ll see him soon.

The shield collects dust in your attic. You know Peggy goes to look at it sometimes, and shoots it with her old service gun, also sometimes. You know she knows you go to look at it sometimes, and hold it like a child each time.

You’ll see him soon.

It will be over soon.

You remember everything.

 

 

**xxx**

 

 

You remember where the clearance is as if you were here yesterday.

You were here today. You were here decades ago. You are here now. You wanted to take a peek at yourself, but you’re still a coward.

There is a bench. You didn’t notice it the first time.

You sit on it. Behind you, you can hear their voices. You hear Banner, you hear Sam, you hear him. What would he say if you said hello to him in Russian? But this is an inappropriate fantasy.

Your past you has gone. He is with her now. That’s for the best, probably. A human life can only encompass so much before exploding into atoms. You think the man who has just gone might have exploded otherwise, even though not exploding never stopped causing him pain. Causinped causing him pain.

They will notice you any second now, won’t they?

What will you say?

Do you apologize? It has only been seconds for them, but it’s been decades for you. How unfair is it that you let him miss your life for the second time? Or is it third? Is anyone keeping count?

They approach you.

Oh, you see him. He hasn’t changed. Of course he hasn’t.

You are shocked when you realize that you can’t say anything. There isn’t anything you _could_ say. Apologizing is irrelevant. Explaining just as well. They would care for it, but you’re ashamed in a quiet, non-committal way.

You are here to pass on the shield. You are here to look at him one last time.

Blue eyes; dark hair; a smile that has grown crooked over the years the same way yours has; a confident posture; burden hidden in the straight line of his shoulders.

You can’t say anything because the only thing you want to say is this:

_I wish I kissed you on that skating rink, Buck,_

but you should have said that years or minutes ago, your choice.

So you don’t say anything.

You remember now. You don’t need to. He knows, because he has always known you better than you have known yourself, or him. He understands.

He will go on to make his choice now, too. Barely minutes after you.

Look at you, you skinny Brooklyn rat. You’ve finally outrun your best friend. You can only hope he will be the happier for it.

You think he will be. That is enough


End file.
